asked what kind of business they were in and when Andrei told him what Fishbowll was, he nodded knowingly. He explained that, as the letter stated, they were required only to provide transactional data – dates, times, email addresses, IP addresses – but not the content of any communications.
‘Is this common?’ asked Andrei.
‘The government issues about one hundred thousand of these a year.’
‘One hundred thousand?’
‘In the business you’re in, you’re going to see a lot of these.’
‘Should we challenge it?’ asked Ben.
‘Do you have grounds?’
Ben looked at Andrei, who shrugged.
The lawyer described the grounds for challenge. ‘Be aware that the government will contest your challenge as high as it needs to go. It does whatever it can to avoid precedents that could impair its ability to use this instrument. It will involve you in considerable expense. But that doesn’t mean you can’t win if you have grounds and you’re determined. There have been cases where the government has had to back down or modify its demands. But it’s a long and very costly process.’
Ben and Andrei glanced at one another again. The company’s finances were thin enough as it was.
‘What do most people do when asked for this data?’ asked Ben.
‘They hand it over.’
‘Homeplace? Would they be doing that?’
‘I would imagine that occasionally, in some exceptional case, they might haggle with the FBI, but mostly they would probably hand it right over.’
‘The FBI agent said they’d win if we challenged.’
‘He would,’ said the lawyer. ‘Unless you have grounds to challenge, this is perfectly legal, remember. This is above board. You may not like it, but right now it’s the way our justice system works. No court needs to authorize this. But remember, it’s only the transactional stuff you have to give them.’ The attorney smiled for a second. ‘As you probably know, the government has its own ways of getting at the good stuff.’
Back at Robinson House, Kevin predictably blew up again. But Andrei didn’t see an alternative. Instinctively, he didn’t want to hand over the data, and felt that he was compromising himself. He had heard so much about the way the government’s intelligence agencies operated that he had no idea if they really had a case against the suspects they were supposedly investigating, or if it was just a fishing expedition. But he couldn’t imagine that he would win a court challenge, and he didn’t see the point of wasting Fishbowll’s dwindling reserves of cash on a quixotic attempt to avoid a foregone conclusion.
The problem prompted a number of lengthy discussions. It made them determined to ensure that Fishbowll’s security would always be as strong as it could be in order to prevent any unauthorized gathering of information on their users, to the extent that that was possible. But this instance wasn’t unauthorized, and not even Kevin had an answer to the simple reality that the law required them to comply. All he could say was that it was wrong.
Andrei thought they needed to understand what Fishbowll was there to do. Was it there to challenge the law? Did it have an ideology it wanted to promote? While Kevin blustered, Andrei talked through the questions with Ben. Eventually, Andrei decided that Fishbowll was neutral. It had to be neutral. If people wanted to challenge the law, it was a medium for them to do it – the medium, not the message.
In the end, Andrei handed over the data to Dimmer, still feeling conflicted about it. He told the agent that in future Ben would act as the officer to be contacted for National Security Letters. It wasn’t long before more of them arrived.
11
AS FISHBOWLL GREW, the three founders struggled to keep up with their class work. The academic authorities at the university had got to know about the website and while they had no power to stop anyone working on it – and had their own interest in seeing a successful tech start-up emerging from Stanford – they let Andrei, Kevin and Ben know that they were expected to maintain their studies. Amongst themselves, the three young men had agreed that they would each do the minimum required to get through their courses until the end of the academic year. Every other waking moment was devoted to Fishbowll.
The common room of the suite in Robinson was an engine house. Andrei and Kevin would be deep in coding, Ben would be analysing user statistics, responding to questions in the Grotto or dealing with inquiries coming from the press, which