- This chapter opens with Marcus talking about histograms: what they are and how they work.
- FasTrak, a radio-based "wallet" that pays tolls for cars when the cross bridges, can now give readings all over the city because of DHS added readers along with the cameras.
- So people can be tracked whenever they're in a car, no matter what.
- More people are starting to protest. Fifty thousand marched down the street after a week.
- Taxi companies are also starting to give discounts to people who pay with special cards. Sounds a lot like rideshares like Uber and Lyft (remember: this book came out in 2008, well before either company).
- Marcus's dad thinks Marcus is paranoid. They argue about what a citizen's duty is to America. Again.
- The story jumps to Marcus and Van sitting in Dolores Park after school, just hanging out. Marcus realizes that Van is "totally h4wt" (that's hot) (8.26). Darryl knew that all along, but Marcus just figured it out.
- Talking about what Marcus's dad would do if he got randomly pulled over, Van unintentionally give Marcus an idea.
- If everyone were being pulled over, it'd be a disaster because of gridlock.
- Arphid cloning could make this happen. Randomly swapping tags on people with other people's codes would make everyone look abnormal, messing up the surveillance norms.
- Marcus tells Van, and she gets up and walks away. She's angry because he'd be putting people in danger. Marcus's angry because the country will be turned into a prison if no one stops them.
- Remember, Marcus vowed to bring down the entire DHS, partly because Darryl's still gone. Van shoves Marcus and takes off alone.
- To the blogs: Marcus writes his first post on Open Revolt, his Xnet site, under the name M1k3y. He puts up a HOWTO for building arphid cloners, tips for getting close to people, and puts his own cloner in his jacket pocket.
- Cut to a long explanation about "the paradox of the false positive" (8.58). Tests for a disease that are 99% right are also 1% wrong. If you had a test that was 99% accurate about catching terrorists, it has the same problem.
- Here are the numbers: if you had a pool of 20 million people, a 99% accurate test will identify 200,000 as terrorists. But only ten of them are really terrorists. #math
- But surprise—DHS terrorism tests are between 40% and 60% accurate.
- Operation False Positive begins and lines appear all over the city. Some chemical engineering students make a substance that's harmless but trips an explosive sniffer, and then watch their professors get flying-tackled by security guards that are now everywhere.
- It's chaos. No one's scanners work properly any more. Not at the hospital, at school, or on the road.
- After school (where they got out early so the teachers could try and get home by a reasonable time), Marcus goes home and checks out what's happened that day on Xnet.
- His dad gets home three hours late that night because he was pulled over, searched, and questioned by police. Twice.