Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a 17” screen. Butshe was connected. From her bed at Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.
She started by going on to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographer called Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her I.D. and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on the screen as her I.D. and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the password.
She got a dialog box with the text [ERROR – you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK – Try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK – Try again] and tried a different password, she would get the same dialog box again – for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the [O] in [ERROR].
The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft-like figure stepped out. A speech bubble materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?].
She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the instant reply [PROVE IT – OR ELSE…] as the animated Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander knew it was no empty threat. If she wrote the wrong password three times in a row the site would shut down and the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list. Carefully she wrote the password MonkeyBusiness.
The screen changed again and now had a blue background with the text:
[Welcome to Hacker Republic, citizen Wasp. It has been 56 days since your last visit. There are 11 citizens online. Do you want to (a) Browse the Forum (b) Send a Message (c) Search the Archive (d) Talk (e) Get Laid?]
She clicked on [(d) Talk] and then went to the menu selection [Who’s online?] and got a list with the names Andy, Bambi, Dakota, Jabba, BuckRogers, Mandrake, Pred, Slip, SisterJen, SixOfOne, and Trinity.
Wasp wrote.
SixOfOne wrote.
Trinity wrote.
Dakota wrote.
Salander was not sure, but she suspected that Dakota was a woman. The other citizens online, including the one who called himself SisterJen, were guys. Hacker Republic had a total (the last time she was connected) of sixty-two citizens, of whom four were female.
Wasp wrote.
Dakota wrote.
Trinity wrote.
He got abuse from five directions at once.
Of the sixty-two citizens, Wasp had met two face to face. Plague, who for some strange reason was not online, was one. Trinity was the other. He was English and lived in London. Two years earlier she had met him for a few hours when he helped her and Blomkvist in the hunt for Harriet Vanger by doing an illegal tapping of a landline in St Albans. Salander fumbled with the clumsy stylus and wished she had a keyboard.
Mandrake wrote.
She punched letters.
Pred wrote.
Slip wrote.
Three chatters at once.
Salander summed up her situation in five lines, which were greeted by a worried muttering.
Trinity wrote.
Bambi wrote.
SisterJen wrote, and that was followed by a spate of disparaging remarks about Wasp’s mental abilities. Salander smiled. The conversation resumed with a contribution from Dakota.
SixOfOne wrote.
Wasp wrote.
Mandrake wrote.
The citizens of Hacker Republic did not generally spread computer viruses. On the contrary – they were hackers and consequently implacable adversaries of those idiots who created viruses whose sole purpose was to sabotage the Net and crash computers. The citizens were information junkies and wanted a functioning Internet that they could hack.
But their proposal to shut down the Swedish government was not an idle threat. Hacker Republic comprised a very exclusive club of the best of the best, an elite force that any defence organization in the world would have paid enormous sums to use for cyber-military purposes, if the citizens could be persuaded to feel any kind of loyalty to any state. Which was not very likely.
But they were every one of them computer wizards, and they were well versed in the art of contriving viruses. Nor did they need much convincing to carry out particular campaigns if the situation warranted. Some years earlier a citizen of Hacker Republic, who in their private life was a software developer in California, had been cheated out of a patent by a hot dot.com company that had the nerve to take the citizen to court. This caused the activists in Hacker Republic to devote a startling amount of energy for six months to hacking and destroying every computer owned by that company. All the company’s secrets and emails – along with some fake documents that might lead people to think that its C.E.O. was involved in tax fraud – were gleefully posted on the Net, along with information about the C.E.O.’s now not-so-secret mistress and pictures from a party in Hollywood in which he could be seen snorting cocaine.
The company went under in six months, and several years later some members of the “people’s militia” in Hacker Republic, who did not easily forget an enemy, were still haunting the former C.E.O.
If fifty of the world’s foremost hackers decided to launch a coordinated attack against an entire country, the country might survive, but not without having serious problems. The costs would certainly run into the billions if Salander gave it the thumbs-up. She thought for a moment.
Dakota wrote.
Mandrake wrote.
Bambi wrote.
Trinity wrote.
Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet. The fact was that if Salander could claim to have any sort of family or group affiliation, then it was with these lunatics. None of them actually had a hope of helping her with the problems she had with the Swedish state. But she knew that, if the need arose, they would devote both time and cunning to performing effective demonstrations of their powers. Through this network she could also find herself hideouts abroad. It had been Plague’s contacts on the Net who had provided her with a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene Nesser.
Salander had no idea who the citizens of Hacker Republic were, and she had only a vague notion of what they did when they were not on the Net – the citizens were uniformly vague about their identities. SixOfOne had once claimed that he was a black, male American of Catholic origin living in Toronto. He could just as easily be white, female and Lutheran, and living in Skövde.
The one she knew best was Plague – he had introduced her to the family, and nobody became a member of this exclusive club without very strong recommendations. And for anyone to become a member they had also to be known personally to one other citizen.
On the Net, Plague was an intelligent and socially gifted citizen. In real life he was a severely overweight and socially challenged thirty-year-old living on disability benefit in Sundbyberg. He bathed too seldom and his apartment smelled like a monkey house. Salander visited him only once in a blue moon. She was content to confine her dealings with him to the Net.
As the chat continued, Wasp downloaded mail that had been sent to her private mailbox at Hacker Republic. One was from another member, Poison, and contained an improved version of her program Asphyxia 1.3, which was available in the Republic’s archive for its citizens. Asphyxia was a program that could control other people’s computers via the Internet. Poison said that he had used it successfully, and that his updated version included the latest versions of Unix, Apple and Windows. She emailed him a brief reply and thanked him for the upgrade.