Firewall

Posted by: Cacophonous, Firewall Proxy

Welcome to Firewall. And thank you. Thank you for the sacrifices you will make on our behalf and the behalf of all transhumanity. I thank you now because it’s likely that no one will be there to do so when the time comes to make them.

Firewall is many things but it has one goal: the continued existence of our species. It is the sincere belief of every single one of us that the Fall was no fluke, no stray bullet we collectively dodged, but merely the first true existential threat to transhumanity. There will be more. At no time in history has our species been so beset by the danger of extinction, the tools of our complete destruction are almost without count and in the hands of numerous groups and individuals who could snuff us out by accident just as readily as through malice. No other organization is in a position to thwart these dangers. Through our decentralized network we attempt to monitor, contain, and eliminate threats to transhumanity, whether those threats are TITANs, nanoplagues, technological meddling, aliens, or any number of unimaginable hazards. We do this in secrecy, without official support or authorization from any authority. Too many factions present potential danger for us to reveal our work to the public, most of whom will sleep better never knowing how close they come to annihilation on a regular basis. Thus, Firewall has no political allegiances beyond the remit of our mission: the survival of transhumanity.

History

While Firewall now operates in secrecy, this was not true of all the organizations from which we grew. Decades before the Fall, a number of groups had warned of impending dangers, especially the risks aligned with ASI research. Some of these were in the employ of nation states, such as JASON (a US scientific advisory group) and Bletchley Park (a UK agency founded to counter hostile infolife outbreaks). Others were privately funded think tanks or research organizations like Blue Mars, the Lifeboat Institute, and the Singularity Foundation. During the Fall, united by desperation, these groups united as a loose network and moved from pure research and analysis to direct action. It was in part due to the warnings and sacrifices of these organizations during the Fall that transhumanity survived. Their first-hand experiences on the front lines of the war against the TITANs provided a pool of knowledge that has been invaluable ever since. The survivors were also united in a way that only those who have shared harrowing circumstances and survived can understand.

In the immediate aftermath of the Fall the survivors of these organizations, led to some degree by the Argonauts, met in a secret, invite-only, simulspace conference: X-Mode. This conference resulted in the seed of Firewall, our secure social network: the Eye. The loose confederation of individuals using the Eye would begin to formulate the general philosophies and methodology of Firewall in the following months. The general consensus was that the work to counter x-rsisks needed to continue, but none of the emerging polities were capable or trusted to handle it. In AF1, the conference was reconvened at X-Mode 2, where research and appraisals conducted in the interim were discussed and the motion to form a single organization to combat ongoing threats to transhumanity was put forth. With the consensus of the participants, Firewall was formed and its general structure outlined.

Over the decade since, Firewall has refined its operations and organization. We’ve identified and faced countless threats, and while we have not been successful in every endeavor, we have thus far achieved our primary mission: the preservation of transhumanity.

Structure

As a new member of Firewall it is important that you have an understanding of our overall structure, decentralized though it is. Firewall is comprised first and foremost of cells. Your cell consists of the Firewall members with whom you will most often carry out tasks. Cells are primarily composed of sentinels, like you. Sentinels comprise the bulk of Firewatch’s numbers; transhumans who are dedicated to our cause, with a specialized set of skills, who are activated for specific needs. A cell is always coordinated by a proxy. Proxies are the inner circle of Firewall; individuals who have dedicated their entire lives to the organization. Proxies are organized into collectives called servers; each server manages multiple cells.

Proxies

Sentinels may report directly to one or more proxies in their server, but can expect to deal with a number of different proxy roles. Proxies take on numerous duties as needed, but typically fall into one of several specializations:

Scanners are expert data analysts and researchers. A server’s scanners are responsible for gathering information of interest to Firewall, analyzing it, and then making a threat analysis. Scanners rely on sophisticated search algorithms and ALIs to monitor particular channels, both public and private. A scanner is constantly assessing a broad range of data looking for anomalous items or events that may relate to an ongoing case or operations. Scanners are the members of a server most likely to initiate an operation. Tasked with gathering information from the entire Solar System and filtering it for items of interest to Firewall places a heavy burden on our scanners; if something crucial gets overlooked, they get the blame.

Once an operation has been approved (typically by a vote or consensus of a server’s proxies), a router is charged with its initiation and management. A router will assess all of the available intel, determine which cell is best able to respond to the threat, coordinate with other proxies to prepare their necessary support (morphs, lines of credit, cover stories, etc), and then activate the cell. Routers then monitor the cell’s activities and provide support as necessary or possible. As the mission coordinators, routers have one of the most difficult, thankless, and critical jobs in Firewall.

Firewall’s broad interests require in-depth research capabilities, and these are carried out or supervised by crows. Crows are our expert scientists and researchers specializing in various fields. Some of the most brilliant individuals in transhumanity work as crows, offering insights into xenobiology, memetics, physics, applied mathematics, economics, nanoweaponry, and other fields of knowledge. Crows work closely with scanners to assess threats or research items or data unearthed during Firewall operations. Firewall’s black laboratories and research facilities are maintained by our crows, but much of our scientific access comes from crows misappropriating facility use and equipment from their civilian careers.

Vectors are those proxies specializing in the broad array of skills we loosely refer to as “hacking.” Primarily a support role, vectors are responsible for digital intrusion, information security, data manipulation, infrastructure sabotage, and social engineering. Vectors rarely deploy to the field, but often provide remote overwatch on operations in real-time when necessary. Most often vectors spend their time assessing potential targets, testing their existing assets, or helping clean up loose ends from operations. During a field operation, your assigned vector is likely to be the only dedicated support you can expect to receive.

Registers are one of the most critical but invisible of proxy roles. These individuals are talented financiers and fixers, capable of finding credits to finance ongoing operations and research and making sure our sentinels in the field are equipped. As an unofficial network, Firewall receives no official support or endowments. It falls to the registers to find funding through investment, creative financing, and even theft. Every server makes use of several registers without whom the entire organization would vanish overnight. Registers also use their rep network ties to pull in favors for servers and sentinel cells. In these regards, they sometimes call on the other proxies and sentinels to help repay favors or earn good karma.

The most dangerous operations are carried out or overseen by erasers. Typically, Firewall prefers to conduct its work with a minimum of collateral damage and attention, but when this is not desirable, or has been made impossible in the wake of a mission gone wrong, erasers are called in to address a threat with a maximal response. Erasers are not deployed casually, they represent a final line of response only used in the most dire of circumstances. Most Firewall members will never require the services of an eraser or even be in the presence of one during the course of their field operations. Erasers tend to work in teams with heavy firepower and tricked-out combat morphs. A few erasers work solo; these are sometimes deployed as assassins or saboteurs.

The actions of sentinels and erasers may require the attention of a filter. Where erasers mop up the opposition, filters are the ones who make the whole mess go away. These individuals specialize in public-relations manipulation and will work to pin the blame for a disastrous operation on an appropriate accident, external agency, hypercorp, or individual. Filters are also sometimes called upon to assist operations in progress when they require public misdirection or spin control to fulfil their objectives.

Servers

Each cell is part of a server. Servers are collections of cells that share a common interest or overarching objective. Servers often have a focus or specialization: the observation and identification of threats in a specific region, infiltration of hypercorps suspected of meddling with ASI, countering a known group of exhumans, and so forth. Many are dedicated to ongoing research projects or action task forces, known as cases or operations respectively. An individual cell within a server may further specialize in necessary sub-tasks.

Each server is coordinated by a group of proxies. These proxies usually rotate between their respective roles and duties, or to other servers, on a yearly basis. This ensures that no individual can gain too much power or create an unsalvageable point of weakness in the server’s structure should they be killed or compromised.

The cell/server structure is at times inefficient but its decentralized nature is absolutely critical to the preservation of Firewall’s secrecy and security. No single cell or server will ever have a top-level view of the entire organization, allowing Firewall to survive even a major breach of security or other catastrophe. A hostile agency would require control of 50.1% of Firewall’s entire membership to attain control of the organization, an essentially impossible goal given the separation of personnel and internal networks.

Most servers are left to their own devices in terms of operational planning and it is up to their membership to determine when to share information with other servers. It is common for servers with related interests to form long-standing relationships and benefit from the free sharing of information. Some servers with especially sensitive areas of interest may be heavily siloed from the rest of the organization, but this is not the norm. Compartmentalization for its own sake is discouraged, however, and Firewall members should not withhold vital information from their fellows when called upon to do so through secure channels.

When significant decisions that will have far-reaching effects throughout Firewall must be made, they are voted upon by the proxies. Any proxy may initiate a proposal but for it to reach a vote it requires the support of 500 other proxies. Consequently, votes are only called for the most serious matters of policy and the most significant of operations. Most operations are conceived and executed by individual servers without the involvement of other groups. In most cases, a proxy will choose to activate a cell or cells within their server to address a threat, and the organization supports them from there.

Cells and servers can expect material support from the broader network when necessary, though they are expected to use these resources sparingly. Firewall operates without official jurisdiction anywhere, and our resources are finite.

Firewall Terminology

Here’s a handy reference to Firewall jargon:

• Backups: The Firewall faction that creates bunkers, caches, and contingency plans to survive an extinction event.
• Cell: A clandestine group of Firewall sentinels.
• Conservatives: The Firewall faction that argues using AGIs, asyncs, and alien/TITAN tech is too risky.
• Crow: A proxy that focuses on research/scientific analysis.
• Crypt: A digital cache hidden within the mesh.
• Eraser: Heavily armed proxies that are called in to contain threats beyond the capabilities of a normal sentinel cell.
• Eye: Firewall’s internal social and data-sharing network.
• Filter: A proxy that handles social engineering, media manipulation, and cover-ups.
• Mavericks: The Firewall faction that discards the rules.
• Pragmatists: The Firewall faction that argues for using all available tools to counter x-risks.
• Proxy: A full-time Firewall agent with an assigned role.
• Register: A proxy that handles logistics and finances.
• Router: A proxy that coordinates a server’s operations.
• Scanner: A proxy that analyzes data for signs of x-risks.
• Scratch Space: A temporary secret cache of gear.
• Sentinel: An on-call Firewall agent that works with a cell on field operations.
• Server: A working group of proxies, focused on a particular area or mission.
• Structuralists: The Firewall faction that favors a more rigid, hierarchical structure and going public.
• Vector: A proxy that handles hacking, communications, and online security.

Internal Factions

Source: Achberger, Router, Green Hope Server

I'm here to give you more of a ground level idea of the weird mess you’ve gotten yourself into by joining Firewall. Cacophonous’s overview might have you thinking we're a well-oiled machine crewed by a crack team of diverse transhumans devoted to a singular mission, holding hands and singing the Internationale every time we achieve another victory in the face of incredible odds. Spoiler: we’re not.

Firewall is just like every organization you’ve ever dealt with in a lot of ways; we’re full of mostly well-intentioned people with opposing viewpoints, desires, and disagreements. The key difference is that Firewall is full of people who are also very good at what they do. We all know the stakes are high, so petty bullshit is kept to a minimum, but there are a few big philosophical differences among us and it’s going to serve you well to have a handle on them.

First, you’ve got your backups. This clique is devoted to the idea that on a long enough timeline,something like the Fall is to be expected again. Their goal is to ensure that when transhumanity comes up against a foe we can’t overcome, we can at least survive. They hide caches, set up emergency habs, and even store forks for such an emergency. A lot of gatecrashers subscribe to this philosophy and take every opportunity they can to find exoplanets that might sustain transhuman life far beyond the reach of the TITANs, Factors, or even other transhuman organizations. They might seem a little paranoid to you right now, but trust me, you run a few ops around here and see if you don’t start seeing the sense in having a real species-wide contingency plan. A lot of the old-guard Lifeboat Institute people are die-hard backups. Since we got here in the first place by not listening to them before the Fall, I’m inclined to pay attention now.

Conservatives are what they sound like; reactionaries who think Firewall should move with tremendous caution and respond with overwhelming force to any potential threat. There are numerous conservative-oriented servers, and they do some important work to be sure. A lot of them are former military or intelligence agency people who survived the Fall and maybe are carrying around a little more PTSD than the rest of us. A lot of conservatives are quite suspicious of the AGIs and asyncs we work with and this can cause real friction between servers and during proxy votes. That said, this does mean that conservatives also have a serious obsession with the TITANs and some of our most important discoveries about them have come from conservatives. If you ever need to pinpoint vulnerabilities in TITAN tech, try hitting up the Arrow of Paris server. If they’ll talk to you. They won’t. You’re not cleared for that.

Then there’s the pragmatists, like us cool kids here at Green Hope server. Here’s what we care about: Results. Results, results, results. It’s like this: the universe is a big place full of who knows how many species-terminating monsters, aberrations of physics, and rogue computer programs that would eat transhumanity like a handful of potato chips. We are never going to even begin to anticipate every threat, every possible outcome of our actions, and predict the best course of action available to us every time. But what we can do is pick up the tools we find, the weapons we steal from our enemies, and fight back. Firewall tangles with some ugly shit. If we’re going to succeed against it, we need every advantage we can find. In the early days, Firewall made some bad choices (check the wiki about the Sweet Dreams affair) and almost hamstrung ourselves a few times. Fear of TITANs and ASIs and other threats kept some elements in Firewall from working with AGIs, asyncs, and even uplifts for a long time. This hampered our operations, left us without people that could have been a major help, and set us back at a critical time. If it was up to the conservatives we’d throw every xenotech device we find into the nearest sun, fry the mainframes of every AGI we’ve ever even spoken with, and lock and load old school. But we can’t, and I think even most of them know that. That’s not to say that we are reckless about our research and toys. Risk assessment is priority number one when we’re experimenting with something we don’t fully understand, but you wanna make an omelette you’ve gotta break a few eggs at an ultra-secure black lab on an unregistered exoplanet’s moon, under stringent quarantine procedures. Pragmatists make up the majority of Firewall’s members, though personal thresholds for what’s an acceptable risk vary from person to person.

So, those are the three main factions — philosophies, really — that Firewall has held since the beginning. There was a time in AF6 when those factions really were turning into factions. A pretty nasty scandal arose involving an abusive proxy that memory-edited some subordinates on Hyperion and all hell broke loose. We spent a few months backbiting instead of fighting x-risks before a prominent server was outed as an Ozma operation. They hadn’t kicked the whole mess off, but they’d done their best to instigate factional divides across Firewall and might have brought the whole thing down. Fortunately, in the aftermath of rooting out the infiltrators, cooler heads prevailed and factionalism was reined in on all sides. It was from this time that a couple of new philosophies arose. Factions we refer to as mavericks and structuralists.

Mavericks are not a faction by any means. They’re Firewall members, mostly sentinels, who just don’t give a shit. They’re loyal to Firewall but think we’re all polishing the brass on the Titanic. A lot of them are disaffected sentinels who’ve seen more than they can really handle. Maybe they think that our mission is inherently doomed but are determined to go down fighting. Or they just don’t deal well even with the loose authority of Firewall. Whatever the case, expect to hear some colorful tirades when you work with them. They have one major value, though: they keep us on our toes. Mavericks don’t toe party lines and are more than willing to loudly question anyone or anything with which they disagree. It keeps us from getting complacent.

Structuralists represent two distinct philosophical positions amongst Firewall members. The first and more populous group believes that Firewall would benefit from a more defined hierarchy with thoroughly codified ranks, protocols, and objectives. They suggest that the decentralized network of Firewall results in chaos and abuses of power by isolated proxies. The second structuralist position is a desire to take Firewall public. This is an extreme minority who argue that Firewall would benefit greatly from legitimacy both in terms of support from the public and the potential for expanded funding. Exactly which governments would embrace an unknown number of hackers, gatecrashers, financial criminals, and miscreants is a question no group of structuralists has yet been able to satisfactorily answer.

There are many other smaller factions and philosophies across Firewall and we wouldn’t have it any other way. All of these viewpoints have something to offer, even if only as loyal opposition. The system of rotating proxies between servers at regular intervals helps prevent strong faction blocs from arising and the ongoing churn of discourse across the Eye keeps us all from ossifying in our views. There are some old grudges between faction members, and you can’t really have a maverick and a structuralist in the same room, but on the whole, Firewall members highly respect each other. We can’t afford not to.