Quantum of solace?

Solace

spam, spam, spam ...

It's good to know that it's not just the little people who are plagued by spam in their emails. the following is from a report in the Washington Post:

"Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

"In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”

"The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.

"After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”"

The report is headlined "NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally". That's "globally" as in technically anywhere outside the United States, and "millions" as in 250 million per year:

"During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year."

Time future contained in time past

In 1975, when the future US President Obama was in his mid teens, Senator Frank Church's Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities published its reports.

"The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the "national security" the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.

"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

...

"While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a "potential" for violence -- and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave "aid and comfort" to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.

"The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included "a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black." Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist-"Hate Group."

"Furthermore, the actual targets were chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply. The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently "anti-Communist". The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College ("vanguard of the New Left") to the New Mexico Free University and other "alternate" schools, and from underground newspapers to students' protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them."

Only collect

As the latest installment in the revelations of western governments' ability to strip mine our private lives hits the news-stands (never mind, it will all be ploughed in and grassed over in 1 month / 3 months / 6 months / 5 years) the furniture designer-makers discussion forum is once again asking whether social media, Facebook, Twitter, Printerest and their like, are a good thing for us to be exploiting professionally (or is it commercially?). Can they make us rich and famous, when all else has failed?

Beyond a strand of reluctance to get involved and a sense of scepticism, the general feeling seems to be that if it is there and it's free - and it's new - one ought to use it. It used to be said it's not what you know that counts, but who you know. Now, apparently, it's how many you know. 'Counting' is no longer analogue - it's all become digital.

Though the saviour of one's soul may log onto one's social media page, it all seems part of the spread of largely redundant and superficial connectedness that now increasingly defines our society. The trouble is, it needs a National Security Agency to make sense of it.

Nobody on our forum seems to make the connection. I don't mean that if we put up our latest creations on Facebook we should fear a visit from men with baseball caps and name tags: just that from time to time one has to take a look at one's inner being.

Incidentally, I wonder if others have been struck as I have by the contrasting appearance of Bradley Manning, done up to the nines, almost like a Ruritanian general if not quite up to North Korean standards, and the butch and scruffy sub-fusc of his minders - no medals for them - who look like something from the mafia or from Blackwater. Perhaps they are. There is a learned article to be written on the semiotics here, but the essential message is that Bradley Manning has subverted the full panoply of the American state, with which he was trusted, but the government has Bruce Willis on the case and all will be well. An even larger treatise might be written, considering how it is that the United States population can buy into wholesale the evil characterisation of its government agencies depicted in such movies as The Bourne Inheritance and yet still side with the real-life versions of the bad guys. Perhaps it's all down to the skills of central casting - or perhaps things are changing.

Of course the NSA and its likes know that counting is, like taxes, for little people. We may watch anxiously the numbers of our visits or supporters or followers, but they, heck, want it all. They know that after the collecting comes the connecting. As one of them said, how can we connect the dots if we don't have the dots? In other words, how can we explain (to the judge or whomever) why we want it before we have it? 

Unfortunately their idea of connection is little more sophisticated than the way in which the caveman's club connected with the woolly mammoth. So, pacé our good and reassuring Malcolm Rifkind, although we indeed should not fear that the analysts are listening in to our fireside chats with our grannies, we should fear that if we innocently acquired enough dots, or spots, like that poor Algerian airline pilot who shared some unfortunate spots just after the demolition of the twin towers and was held for months in high security without there being any actual evidence against him, someone will be connecting for us. 

He added: "If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other." The source said analysts used four criteria for determining what was examined: security, terror, organised crime and Britain's economic wellbeing."The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at ... we simply don't have the resources."