after 9/11, and had made an announcement to that effect. But the hearings would have to wait until after the FBI and the other agencies involved had completed their initial investigations. That would mean a delay of at least a couple of months. By then, the raw shock of the bombing would have receded and, outside Denver and the beltway, the nation’s attention would have moved on. And she would be investigating investigators, not people implicated in the actual crimes. McKenrick expected to receive a good degree of coverage for the hearings, but nothing like the attention she would have received if she could have held them right then, and if she could have had in front of her committee people with some responsibility for what had happened.
The allegation of the link with Fishbowl thus caught her attention. She had heard only vaguely of the company, and it had probably stuck in her mind only because of its ridiculous name, but McKenrick had sat on hearings in the past into the security implications of social media. Supporters of social media cited the role it had played in helping democracy movements bring down repressive regimes in places as far-flung as Tunisia and Thailand. She saw this enthusiasm as naive. They saw democracy – she saw destabilization, and the potential for similar activities by extremist minorities against democratically elected governments. If what was being said about the usage of this Fishbowl website by the Denver killers was true, it was as if her prophecy had come to life.
When McKenrick was told that the CEO of Fishbowl had posted a statement saying that Fishbowl might have unwittingly facilitated the planning of the atrocity, she read it in disbelief. In the senator’s opinion, admitting that something like that might have happened without pledging action to stop it in future was an outrage. For that reason, it was also a gift. A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted gift. So much so that she couldn’t believe anyone connected with one of these companies would ever do it. She got her chief of staff to call Fishbowl and make sure it was genuine. Apparently it was.
An opportunity like this didn’t come along every day. The senator felt as if she almost had a duty to see if she could make something out of it, to tie social networks to terrorism and raise people’s awareness of the true magnitude of the threat they posed. And burnish her security credentials on the national stage along the way. If the Fishbowl involvement in the Denver bombing exposed a chord of anxiety in the American people about lack of control over social media, and if she could touch that chord while it was still raw, she might go from a name known in Arizona, Washington and the arcane world of the intelligence establishment to a name known across the country.
McKenrick had a long discussion with her senior staffers. Some thought she might succeed, others thought the link between Fishbowl and the bombing, still unproven, was too tenuous to create a generalizable case. Eventually the senator had her press spokesman put out a statement welcoming Mr Koss’s intent to cooperate and saying that Senator McKenrick was following very carefully the investigation into the role that Fishbowl and, indeed, other social media sites, might well have played in the taking of the lives of 300 American citizens in Denver. It suggested that if the executives running these sites, as Mr Koss had confessed, were aware of their potential to offer a medium of conspiracy to terrorists, then maybe the time had come for them to do something about it.
And then she waited to see what kind of reaction her statement was going to get.
The noises out of the press at the right end of the spectrum were encouraging. McKenrick decided to push things a little further. She appeared on a couple of politics shows to say that she was looking for responsibility, not restriction. But if restriction was the only way to enforce responsibility, then perhaps some kind of restriction would need to be considered. Or perhaps some other means of ensuring that the next pair of deranged fanatics wouldn’t be provided with the medium to do what Hodgkin and Buckett had done. When asked what she had in mind, she replied that there were steps that Congress could take, and they were all under consideration.
Andrei and the rest of the Fishbowl leadership didn’t even register a vague statement made in Washington by a senator they