In the beginning...A Baron Kendal story

Hindsight is 20:20. Every one of them should have seen it coming but they were all blinded by ego and the sheer joy of finding they were not alone.

Preempting legislation, the major players in the information economy formed a consortium called SMANGS. Incumbent politicians coffers were filled. Bureaucrats were given tools beyond their wildest dreams. Big data and the government were revealed to be Siamese-twins, co-joined at the wallet.

There was some push-back from conservatives and a few other gadflies who valued liberty over a smooth running society.

In a response to mollify the doubters, SMANGS commissioned a massive, integrated effort to be performed by the 100 largest Universities in the United States.

Kendal was nominated by his boss and was one of the first to be on-boarded.

The stated goal of the project was to create a parallel Social Credit score for conservatives with special emphasis on predicting the propensity toward violence.

Kendal learned that there were many thousands of kindred spirits in Academia. As the project progressed he found himself conversing with others who practiced full-contact martial arts, who practiced with firearms and reveled in learning archaic skills like forging edged instruments and flying their own airplanes.

Every University employee had to sign away return rights to their respective University. Nobody gave it a second thought. Even the janitors at SMANGS were wealthy.

The bottom dropped out on a Wednesday eight months after the project started.

Every employee was pink-slipped and given two months severance pay.

Looking for employment the next day, Kendal learned that he was untouchable. He learned that the code they had written and perfected was to populate the lowest caste in society, a caste so low that they could not even sign contracts.

The conservatives with the highest propensity for violence simply disappeared.

He learned just how low of a caste when he went to have an infected sliver cared for. His wife’s insurance did not cover it. In fact, he no longer had a wife. Marriage is a contract, you see.

He also found out that simply sharing an address with the woman he still considered his wife and with his children slagged their social credit scores. After all, they were co-habitating with an untouchable.

Kendal did the manly thing. He moved out. He found a place in the desert to clear his head. He connected, discretely, with some of his former coworkers on the project. They met at fast food places on windy days and ate outside.

SMANGS, in their arrogance, violated Niccolò Machiavelli's advice to keep your friends close and to keep your enemies closer. That was going to cost them.

Kendal spent forty months plotting the message he was going to send back to SMANGS.

***

Kendal was getting bounced around inside the cab of the thirty-year-old pickup truck he was driving to Palm Springs. The pickup truck was a tri-tone: mostly sun-faded blue with a white hood and left fender. It was the color of caliche from the door moldings down.

Hogs get vocal when they are hungry and the hogs were screaming their heads off. The squeals and grunts from the back of the truck were not as disturbing as the smell. But he was getting used to the smell. It smelled like justice to him.

The two scions of the dominant members of SMANGS were to be wed that day.

Kendal and his allies had carefully crafted their attacks. Kendal's was the opening salvo. Follow-up attacks were to be launched at weekly intervals.

First, Kendal told the SMANGS when and where he was to attack them via the time honored method of letters composed of words cut from magazines. Kendal had bums mail the letters from different locations. He hoped security would be tight. In fact, it would be on-par with a Papal visit or a Royal wedding, which it was in a way.

A successful attack, in spite of their best efforts would send a message.

Kendal was forced to learn the fundamentals of high society parties, a topic that had never interested him before. What kind of music. The hors d'oeuvre of choice. The "in" cocktails. Chamber music. The works.

If SMANGS had been watching, they would have seen that Kendal’s interest in the bride’s attire rivaled the most star-struck royalty watchers. He visited the local library almost daily.

Six months before the wedding, Kendal paid a visit to a Texas patriot who trapped hogs. There, Kendal purchased eight, young, fifty-pound feral boars.

By the time Kendal was done training them, two of the boars were dead and all the boars were marked by bites and slashes from the others.

Kendal saw training the pigs as just another exercise in programming. Kendal was very, very good at programming.

Kendal repeatedly starved them for two days and then released them into a very large enclosed area with food. There was never enough food for all eight. First, they had to race the others to be the first to the food. Then they had to fight for it.

Kendal started hiding the food. At first, he left it beneath a tree with a speaker playing Vivaldi.

Then he hid it beneath buckets but placed slices of shiitake mushrooms and bacon-wrapped shrimp atop the buckets.

Sometimes he was able to pick cake out of the trash dumpster behind the grocery store. He used the ones with white frosting to train his fleshy cruise missiles.

Sometimes he placed the food behind flimsy structures made of pallets that the hogs had to crash through to get to the food.

In parallel with training them to find food, he also outfitted them with pack saddles. The saddles draped over their backs and were secured with webbing. Half of the hogs were fitted with saddles that were sandwiches of 5mm steel plate and a stiff, clay-like substance. The other half were fitted with saddles that resembled canteens.

One of the most unusual features of the saddles, however, is that they were outfitted with suitcase handles. There were multiple places where somebody could grab one of the handles if they were compelled to tackle one of the hogs.

The final stage of training involved Kendal fabricating a 5’-6” teepee of poles and wrapping it with paper toweling. It had cost him a great deal of money, but he had purchased a quarter ounce of the bride’s and the groom's favorite fragrances. Kendal spent the final week putting the food atop the tepee and a scarecrow adorned with the bride-and-groom's scents, respectively. The final day, Kendal placed the food beneath the paper towel teepee.

These were the hogs Kendal was driving in the back of the pick-up truck. Six boar hogs at 200-to-250 pounds each. Old enough to have tusks. In boar years, they were the equivalent of college football players.  Kendal did not feed the hogs on the long drive back to California but every half hour he ran a sprayer he had rigged up. The cap on the truck was as battered as the truck itself. Plenty of air blew through the hog pen as he drove the mandatory 55.

The exclusive golf course had been closed down for the ceremony. The reception was to follow immediately afterward. There were hundreds of security deployed around the perimeter of the golf course.

It even looked like they had banks of Patriot Missiles stationed to defend against attack from the air. Perhaps they had taken Kendal's letters seriously. He had taunted them unmercifully that he WAS going to be successful and they would be the laughing stock of the world.

Kendal parked a half-klick downwind of the golf course's perimeter fence.

Traffic was muted. Kendal approached from the desert rather than the civilized side.

The sound of the string quartet was clearly audible.

Kendal pulled the dirt bike off the rack on the front of the pickup and started it up.

Then, walking to the rear of the pickup, he stuck an ice pick into the bottom of the water-filled bucket that kept the dogs of the tailgate latch engaged on the rickety, old truck.

Pulling out the ice-pick, Kendal was not pleased with the feeble flow.

He reinserted the ice-pick and wiggled it around to ream out the hole until he was satisfied with the flow.

Then he hopped aboard the bike and went roaring off, east into the desert.

With any luck, the hogs would join the party at the daddy-daughter dance.

Ve haf not solved Da Prroblem (fiction)

Ivan Petrovich (Pete) Golovina's eyes darted to the pack of Marlboro cigarettes in "Jim's" shirt pocket.  He preferred the Marlboros to the Camel cigarettes in Stan's pocket.  Cigarettes were freely available and smoked though out the day....except for the six hours in "the interview room".

The smoking of cigarettes was not the only thing that was unusual about this government facility.  The facility was an anonymous looking "big box" stuck on the back of a Coast Guard facility.  It was ostensibly an IRS data storage facility.  The employees kept to themselves.  There is no such thing as "good" attention from the IRS.  Nobody pestered the staff for information or to ask them out on dates.

Furthermore, the rooms were separated by four layers of drywall and a full Faraday cage.  Each sheet of drywall was individually adhesive-bonded on butyl rubber blocks and each room had powerful, stand-alone HVAC units.  That is 5000 pounds of drywall for each room and incredible amounts of white noise.  Somebody was very serious about keeping whatever happened in Keokuk, in Keokuk.

Jim asked, "What do you want to talk about today?  Siberia?  Soviet air defense doctrine?  Logistics of POL?"

Jim and Stan had both noticed  Pete's interest in the cigarettes.  They knew that they were in for a bitch session.  You get to know somebody very well when you spend eight month, two hours a day totally devoted to interviewing somebody...and the remaining 8 hours of your work day analyzing everything they said.

"This bores me.  When do I get my Hooka lounge in Eugene?" was Pete's lead off.

"Maybe when you stop sounding like Boris Badenov from Bullwinkle." was Jim's retort.  Jim spoke Russian with the precise enunciation of a person educated in St Petersberg while his English betrayed his origins in a Pennsylvania, Pollack steel-town.  He pronounced "Boris" in the Russian manner, "Boor-Reese"

"Fine" said Pete with an expressive wave of his hand.  "We will discuss Soviet Air Defense Strategy.  You could save me the trouble, it is in every book."

"Central Dispatch identifies a penetration.  Three fighter groups are scrambled.  Two are vectored by Central Dispatch to block access to the most likely or valuable targets.  The third is vectored to intercept.

The intercept team is to out-number the estimated number of intruders by at least three-to-one.  Central Dispatch updates the optimum intercept coordinates as more information develops.

All teams are to achieve maximum operational altitude at full military power and then proceed to their stations."

Stan asked, "Why do the teams operate from maximum operational altitude?"

And that is how the debriefing of defectors was handled.  The same questions were asked over-and-over by different teams of interrogators.  The answers were transcribed and reviewed the next morning.  Often, errors were introduced into the transcripts to "test" his reliability.  Other times, the shabby quality of the interpreters introduced glaring errors.

Pete sighed.  "Fighters operate at maximum operational altitude to provide Central Dispatch with maximum discrimination between friendly and foe.  Fighters operate at maximum operational altitude to minimize exposure to Surface-to-Air missiles.  Fighters operate at maximum operational altitude to activate their look-down radar."

Stan looked at his notes.  "Would you like a cigarette?" he asked.

Nicotine is the preferred drug of soft interrogations.  It is the only addiction that can be reinforced fifty times a day.  The flip side is that it is the only drug that can be withheld fifty times a day to good effect.

Pete shrugged.  Camels were much better than nothing and they were certainly better than the Virginia Slims that Tanya on Team Two smoked.

Part of the debriefing protocol was to immerse the defector in vintage, US TV programming.  That included cigarette ads.  Soviet pilots adored Gunsmoke, Bonanza and admired Hawkeye Pierce's alcohol still.  They craved manly cigarettes.  Propaganda has never been done better.

Stan continued after the cigarette was lit and Pete had inhaled.  "Why does the radar on your fighters only have "look-down" capability?"

Part II
Pete was a radar expert.  He had defected to Keflevik with a second-tier fighter.  Pete graduated with a Master's Degree from Moscow State Technical University.  He placed second in his class and his thesis, A Method for Efficient Synthetic Aperture RADAR Transformations of 3X2-D data into Optimumized Trajectory Cones, subtitled With Compressed Communication protocols between data collection points put him in the elite with regard to desirable defectors.

Pete's thesis was elegant in its simplicity.  It created the theoretical basis that enabled the launch of three Surface-to-Air missiles which would act like three eyes.  The missiles would communicate back to the brain in the last missile launched.  The brain calculated the path of the target through space and ignored flares and all other distractions that did not stay within the limits of the target's performance envelop.  The brain guided the three missiles to three different intersections with the target at quarter second intervals.  A good pilot might avoid the first missile.  A great pilot might avoid the first two missiles.  But the maneuvers required to avoid all three missiles would peel the wings off the plane.

Pete had unrestricted access to the planes that were being used to test RADAR upgrades.  The test flight took off without incident on the day he defected.  One of his wingmen experienced a fuel pump warning light 150 miles over the Barents Sea and turned back.  His other wingman's weapon controls would not activate when Pete went radio-silent and turned his plane west.  Neither event was an accident.

Our side was less interested in Pete's plane than in what he knew and the scuttlebutt he had heard.

Pete replied, "You know why our fighers have look-down capability.  Central dispatch coordinates the battle.  Our central dispatch radar has more capability than you are aware of.  Our fighters only need look-down capability."

Stan said, "Tell me about the capability I am not aware of."

Pete deflected the question.  "Maybe after the plastic surgery, when I can really believe you intend to make good on your promise of the Hooka bar."  That is how debriefing went.  Nobody has to teach a shark to swim.  Nobody has to teach a Russian to play verbal chess.

Stan said, "As a fighter pilot, would you like to have full up-down-sideways-fore-aft capability?  Can't you imagine a time when that might be handy?"

Pete replied, "Of course we would love to have that.  But we cannot package that amount of capability into a plane."

Stan said, "We keep coming back to that, don't we.  You are still using tubes.  Why is that?  We know that you are capable of making very high quality integrated circuits."

Pete replied, "We will be using integrated circuits.  Someday.  And then we will kick your ass out of the sky because Russian pilots are much better than American pilots."

Stan pressed on, "But why aren't you using them now?"

Pete said, "Clearly, it is because we have not solved The Problem."

Part III
Every defector said the same thing.  "We have not solved The Problem."

The art of debriefing is to look for patterns.  And to look for patterns within patterns.  And then to look for even the slightest deviations from those patterns and to pursue those dangling thread to the other end.

"Da Prroblem" was a major riddle.  We had no clue what they meant by this universal "Da Prroblem"

The interrogator's dilemma was that questions reveal much to the person being interrogated.  Good interrogators condition the interviewee by always asking questions that the interrogator already know the answers to.  They do this over, and over and over again.  And one question in a thousand might be a question where we are not sure of the answer.

The best information is volunteered.

A direct question reveals too much.  Some defectors were plants.  They scurried back to Mother Russia.

Stan said, "Ahh!  Yes!  The problem.  It was difficult, but you know we have great technology.  We solved it."

Pete said, "You know, as a matter of professional interest, I wish you would tell me how you did it."

Jim changed the subject, a fact not completely lost on Pete.  "Tell us about the Siberia.  Why are there so many RADAR stations in Siberia?"

****

"There are some things that just do not add up for us." Jim said shortly before their two hours were up.  Everybody was tired and raggedy.

"Your phased array RADAR transmitters are carved from the side of a mountain and you feed 230 Megawatts of power to them.  Clearly you don't know shit about amplifiers, otherwise you could run your radar with one-thousandth of the power and one-hundredth of the area."

Pete flared up. "You think Russians are clowns, buffoons.  You think we make electronics with big hammers like blacksmith?  Our electronics are big for a reason!"  Pete's Russian accent became thick when he became agitated.

One trick of interrogation is for the questioners to remain absolutely stone-faced.  The person being questioned becomes emotionally volatile when deprived of validation of "affective" listeners.  Emotional volatility impairs judgement.

Pete snapped back, "Your arrogance has made you stupid!  You are a small people and trapped in your small way of thinking."

Stan was dismissive.  "Yah, right.  You went with big because your electronics are big and inefficient."

Pete threw back, "It takes a big array and much power to pump 1.33 Megahertz signal."

The earbuds in Jim and Stan's ear lit up.  "What the FUCK?!?!"  Pete's statement had gotten somebody's attention.

"Why would anybody uses 1.33 Megahertz unless they were limited to electronics they recycled out of a box of Crackerjacks?" Stan said, his voice dripping with disdain.

"What is the wingspan of a B-52?  We turned them into Theremin devices and have fingerprinted every plane you have in inventory.  Did you know that many of your planes have corroded rivets attaching the shear panels to the spars?  Yes.  We know that from the attenuation of the signal.  We wish you would do maintenance on your planes.  It would be a great convenience to us."

Jim intervened.  "Hey everybody.  Let's just chill.  Let's kick back and have a smoke before we shut down for the day.  I am out of smokes, Stan, do you mind sharing?"

Turning to Pete, "Can you really do that?  Man, if I were a Russian I would worry about the ones with the weak return signal.  I might not be able to track them."

Pete calmed quickly.  That is one great advantage of nicotine.  It is FAST.  Smoke trickling out of his nostrils he decided Camels were not that bad.  "Not to worry.  We did tests and we think the ones with the bad rivets will not be able to withstand limit maneuvers.  It is a hell of a thing when your opponent knows more about your assets than you do.  No?"

****

The next week
"Our analysts are puzzled by these vertical lines across the face of your phased array radar installations.  What are they?"

Pete said, "They are negative resisters."

Once again the voice in the earbuds lit up..."What the hell is a negative resister?"

Jim casually asked, "It has been a while since I was at University.  Why don't you refresh my memory on negative resisters."

Pete relished the role of the pedantic professor.  "A resister is a device that passes increasing amounts of current as the potential, the voltage, increases.  It stands to reason that a negative resister is a device that has decreasing amounts of voltage as the amount of current increases.  In fact, at zero current it has infinite resistance."

The earpiece said, "There is no such thing."

Stan scoffed, "There is no such thing."

Pete arched one eyebrow.  "There are several in this room."

Jim and Stan both registered surprise.

Pete pointed upward with the cigarette he had been nursing.  "The light tubes."

The room was illuminated with eight foot long, fluorescent light fixtures.

"That is a curious thing.  Why do your radar need 'negative resisters'?" asked Jim.

"Lightening strikes.  Many lightening strikes in the mountains.  Regular lightening rods are conductors and mess up field-and-waves.  Negative resisters do not.  Then we figured we could use them to shield our radar from the problem.  You know they work in reverse... We installed capacitors to energize them to protect the array."

Jim asked in an amused kind of way, "If they solved the problem for the land based radar, why didn't you just apply them to the radar in the planes?"

Pete said, "Too fragile.  It is the sensors, you know.  We can armor the CPU and filter the power.  But the sensors must be sensitive.  Hard to armor from EMP pulse from Tactical Bomb.  Gas filled glass tube too fragile for combat and used too much energy to transmit signal.

****

"The Problem" was that Soviet offensive doctrine included an integrated strategy of using Tactical Nuclear devices.  Their planes used vacuum tubes because the Electromagnetic Pulse would destroy traditional integrated circuits.  The Soviets assumed the US had the mirror image of their doctrine and that we had somehow found a way to armor the integrated circuits in our planes.

We had not.  We smugly assumed that NOBODY would be insane enough to initiate the use of nukes, potentially triggering MAD. Our planes would fall from the air like so many sets of car keys when the silicon based devices in their avionics and engine control systems were turned into sand.  The planes that were on the ground would stay on the ground.

Epilogue
Our military (and congress) collectively soiled their pants.

According to the version of the story that I heard, within a week teams of men wearing cheap, gray, polyester suits were paying visits to the Deans of every research University in the US.

They asked a few simple questions.  "Do you have any professors capable of performing research on fiber optics?  How many grad students can they manage?  How soon can their other projects be mothballed or handed off to other faculty?  If cost is not a constraint, how much money will your institution be able to absorb before it becomes counterproductive."

And that is how fiber optics went from a curiosity to being the commodity that is probably delivering this story to your device.

I was surprised by the interest in the short fiction published earlier this week.  I decided to give it another shot.  I want to hone my ability to write dialog (which intimidates me) and I want to present the idea that fluorescent light tubes have unique properties that might make them valuable to armor electronics against voltage surges and EMP.

All characters in this story are fictitious.  'Pete' combines the first two names of Pavlov and the last name of a journalist in Moscow.  Jim and Stan are throw-away names.  I made it all up...I don't need to be visited by men wearing cheap, gray, polyester suits.  Really.

But if "Pete" were real, his net worth is now somewhere north of $23 million....well run Hooka lounges attract profitable enterprises the way magnets attract nails.  He is twenty kilo heavier and has more massive cheekbones than when he defected.  And his voice makes him sound like he could be Jim's twin brother.

Cyber-bullies (fiction)

---Disclaimer---

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is due to laziness on the part of the author and lack of vigilance on the part of the proofreader. 

---End Disclaimer---

Jetta slammed her smartphone down on the school lunch table.  “This girl is on my last nerve….and there ain’t much left of that one, either.”

Jacob took a peek at the screen.  Arching his left eyebrow he asked, “A friend of yours?”

Scott picked up the phone and read it.  “Jetta.  Your a NASTY. SMELLY. BITCH.”  He handed it back and said, “Nice!  Pity it is anonymous. They could use a grammar lesson.”

Jetta said, “It is Paige Doe.”

Jacob said, “She graduated last year.  I thought she went off to college.”

Jetta said, “Maybe so.  But she is back now.”

Scott asked, “How do you know it is her?”

Jetta said, “I ride into school with Ricky West.  They dated last year.  She started cyber-stalking him from the University and she got extremely inappropriate.  Ricky has younger sisters.  His dad found out about it and filed a restraining order.  Now she is back and really pissed.  She thinks I have the hots for Ricky.”

Scott asked, “Well do you?”

Jetta said, “Well, do I what?”

Scott said, “Do you have a thing for Ricky?”

Jetta said, “Get real.  I mean, he is a good looking guy, he lifts weights and is nice enough…but he doesn’t have a brain in his head and he is stuck on himself.  Besides, who needs a boyfriend who has an ex as crazy as the chick in that old movie, Fatal Attraction?  I already half expect to find my pet cat in the crock-pot when I come home from school."

Scott asked, “How long has she been doing this?”

Jetta said, “She has been doing it for about a month now.  It just never ends.  They come in at all times of the day and night. She is dissing me on every social media site I belong to. It is really pissing me off.”

Jacob asked, “So what are you going to do?”

Jetta said, “I am going to have to change my phone number and all my social media accounts.  It is a royal pain.  The thing that really pisses me off is she is probably doing this to 6 other kids and there is no way we can push back.”

Jacob said, “And you would be wrong.”  He looked a couple of tables over to where the nerds sat and said, “Hey, Tony, come over here for a minute, willya.”

It had been perfectly obvious to the entire Class of 2015 that Tony had the worlds biggest crush on Jetta since 4^th grade.  The only two people who were oblivious to it were Jetta and Tony.

Tony sat down.  “What’s the problem?”

The problem was quickly explained to him.

Tony asked Jetta, “Do you know her phone number?”

Jetta replied, “Yeah, sure.  It is 555-1234”

Tony told the table, “The biggest problem with fixing this kind of problem is maintaining something called ‘plausible denyability’.  But I think I can help Jetta out if one of you guys can swing by the lost-and-found at the mall and pick up a pre-paid phone with some minutes left on it.  Just be sure the phone has a mini-USB port and at least ten minutes left on it.”

----The next day----

Scott slid a phone over to Tony and Jetta.  Tony suggested that Scott and Jacob take a walk.  Tony ran a cable from his laptop to the mini-USB port on the phone.  It took him less than 30 seconds to download the file.

He looked over at Jetta.  “When you want your pound of flesh, go to “Messages” and send the top message in “Drafts”.  Then pull the battery out of the phone and pitch the phone.”

Jetta looked at Tony.  “What is the message?”

Tony said, “The message says, 'Katy Doe phone number 555-12??: Cyber bullying has consequences.'  I also nabbed a picture of her off her Facebook page and put that in the message."

Jetta snorted, “Yeah, like that is going to do any good.”

Tony said, “It will if it goes out to the right people and is repeated enough times.”

Jetta looked interested.  “Whaddya mean.”

Tony said, “My dad told me that the guys at work used to play a lot of practical jokes on each other.  They would pimp each other by filling out the blow-in subscription cards from raunchy magazines with their co-worker’s name and address.  And then one day, a guy screwed up the address and the magazines ended up in a neighbor’s mail box.  There were LOTS of fireworks after that.”

Jetta prodded, “What are you saying?”

Tony continued, “Your message is set up to activate an automatic email program on a router that is based off-shore.  That program sends the message through changing, anonymous IP addresses. Think spam-bots. I set the message up to go to 102 phone numbers.  I figured that it would be a good thing if her family also received this message.  And since most family plans assign sequential numbers it is pretty easy to make that happen.  At while I was at it, I figured we might as well send the message to all of the phone numbers with the same, first five digits as Paige.”

Jetta dismissed the idea.  “Big deal.  Those 99 other people will just blow it off.  They will figure it was a fat-fingers mistake.”

Tony smiled a saintly, scary smile.  “They won’t blow it off if the same message is delivered every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day for the next three days.  That is over a thousand messages. It is an automated program.  And the host cannot be subpeonaed because they are not in the United States.  Somebody will call the cellphone carrier and complain.  The carrier will investigate and probably cancel the family’s plan for violation of terms-of-use.”

“Wait a minute.” Jetta exclaimed.  “You said this message was going to 102 phone numbers.  Who are the other two?”

Tony said, “There are two judges in this county who issue restraining orders. Neither one is known for their sense of humor.  You can guess what the other two numbers are.  Remember:  Plausible denyability. If you are really, really sure that Paige is the one who is harassing you, push the SEND button when nobody is looking and pitch the phone.”

“The best way to get a lot of work done is to motivate others to do it for you.  I think there will be a lot of very motivated people in the next three days.  Just remember to keep your mouth shut.  Not everybody appreciates being the hammer of Karma.”

Jetta looked Tony in the eyes and said, "Thanks Tony.  You are a prince."  Then Jetta pressed the SEND button, popped the back off the phone and pried the battery out.  She offered the battery to Tony, who took it.  A man can never have too many batteries.    Then she slid the phone, sans battery, into her backpack.

---Later that day---

One curiosity about living near the state capital is that the various dignitaries and bureaucrats shop in the same stores as "regular" folks.  It was a pure fluke that the first five digits of the Commandant of the State Police's personal cell phone number were the same as Paige Doe's.

The Commandant was beyond annoyed by the second hour.  He buzzed the Director of Cyber-Crimes and asked him to step over to his office.  "I hate asking for personal favors.  But can the lab figure out how to stop these messages from hitting my phone?"

"Sure, boss." the Director said.  He looked at the messages.  "You know police are supposed to investigate when we have evidence that a crime might have been committed.  Do you want some of my brighter techs to look into this?"

The Commandant replied, "Yeah, that is probably a good idea.  This cyber-bullying seems to be at the root of all kinds of violence.  We would look like idiots if we did not act on this and something happened."

Paige Doe moved to Arizona the next week.  She has an aunt and uncle out there.