*It's pretty good. The voices are good. A nice set of pastiches of the very private and the very official.
The Confessions by Joshua Cohen
(...)
DR. LATESCO: At the risk of venturing into guesses and fictions.
CHAIRMAN COMSTOCK: Indulge me.
DR. LATESCO: If I must, Mr. Chairman.
To begin with, then, let us concur with the current expert opinion that all of this began on what we have been referring to as the dark web—that part of the web not indexed by search engines, which traditionally has trafficked in hacked information: stolen bank information, stolen social security numbers, and so on. Then, let us propose that at some point, some unidentifiable point, caches of other files started appearing there too—files comprised of logs of search histories and browser activities. Say that all of these caches had been obtained in phishing operations, and say that all of the phishers bought and sold these caches, sometimes to each other, and sometimes directly to illegitimate, and even legitimate, online advertisers and retailers.
It was only a matter of time before this trade in the logs of sites that we visited and keywords that we searched came to the attention of more sophisticated criminals, parties acting independently or on behalf of a state or states that brazenly went about stealing and ransoming this information. They were stealing this information for blackmail. They threatened to make this information public if certain sums of cryptocurrency were not received. Simultaneously, there appear to have also been bots pursuing something similar: Not only were they targeting users so as to take their logs, and their email and social accounts, hostage, they were also intervening in the ransom chains by stealing that information from the bots that had stolen it initially. Sometimes the subbots ransomed this information back to the primary bots, sometimes they auctioned it to sub-subbots—to whomever or whichever was the highest bidder or bounty consortium, whether human or virtual, usually virtual....
