When I was 12 I begged for, and got, the Time-Life Enchanted World Series. The first book on ghosts had a line that tickled not only my fantasy-novel-addled brain, but also my budding writerly instinct. We fear ghosts, according to Ghosts, because their gazes say to us: “As I am, so shall you be.” Today, that’s what the Compromised are silently saying to everyone else, with their pained faces, naked selfies, and ruined credit histories. Ask not for whom the next Ashley Madison tolls, it tolls for you. All of you.

No matter how it happens, it’s the same thing that always gets you — the paper trail, the accounting, the database, the logs. Logging, archiving, history, whatever it’s called in this next app, this is what always fucks you in the end. It used to be it fucked you because you were running a mob front company, and someone absconded with the books, which were physical books. Now, it’s because you’re a person-who-is-on-the-internet. This is the magic of living in an age where chit-chat is no longer ephemeral. Our minutia ends up on Pastebin, on the hard drives of journalists, discussed on Reddit, tweeted in screenshots. You don’t have to be important for this to happen to you. You just have to be on the net.

Someone getting mad at me for being too busy to do a story and posting logs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes it’s hacking. We hear a lot about those in the news these days. But it’s not always, and it’s not even usually hacking. The barrier to data betrayal is so low now that it often doesn’t feel like betrayal at all. Screenshotting a Snapchat, posting a mail thread, or copy-pasting some Slack logs hardly feels like wearing a wire when you go to your friends’ house or your boss’ office. Getting it all is so easy when our devices gather it for us, and data has none of the feel of looking into the eyes of a human you are lying to in order to betray them. Most of our leak-able data is right there, burning a hole in our hard drives. It’s so easy to share data with the wide world, and then it’s done. It’s public, it belongs to the attention of the whoever.

I have a habit when I drop into apps like Slack, or start a long DM conversation on Twitter, or whatnot. I say “Hello future Pastebin readers!” or sometimes “Hello officer, sir!” If it’s a conversation with one of my sketchier friends.

While I am known for my writing about security, my chill attitude doesn’t come from my security knowledge. It comes from being hacked so many damn times it’s become a life style. I was first interviewed about what it was like to be a hacking victim 15 years ago, and it had already happened several times in the 1990s by then. When I was working with Anonymous many years later, It was important for me to assume I was compromised by not only law enforcement (and boy, does that ever look more likely now than it even did then). I was also definitely going to get hit by various hackers from the collective itself.

One day, some of my sources got worried about my finances. “Guys,” I said, “Stay out of my bank account.”

“But you have a kid to take care of!”

“Just, stay out,” I told them.

Sometimes, people ask me why I don’t keep a sticker over my webcam. “If you’ve already owned me enough to turn on the webcam,” I say, “The least I can do is force you to watch me pick my nose.”

The first time your data goes traveling without you is surreal. It’s disturbing in a way that feels like it should be physical, like you should be able to drive somewhere and get it all back. There should be someone you can talk to and set it all right. Eventually you realize it’s all copied endlessly without you, that it’s ultimately indifferent to you. It’s simply this property of math that happened to you, personally. Like any developmental milestone, over time you realize: This is how life is. Data just travels, and getting upset about it won’t do anything more than getting upset at a storm, or God.

By this point in my life, anything I say in an unencrypted or logged medium, I tend to ham it up for the day it’s released to the public. Goodbye former audience, hello unintended audience!